Running a dual system under win 2k at the mo, going to upgrade my machine shortly back to a single cpu, is there a way of removing 2k, loading win 98 with out formating and losing all the rest of my stuff on the disk?.
Got no kick agin 2k its been solid since I installed it, but 98 runs a few flight sims I have much faster.
2k was installed using fat32 sys not theNT sys ,so my stuff should be ok under 98.

If you have a second harddrive with enough space, yes.
If you have only one harddrive or not enough space...no way.
This is not an upgrade for Bill Gates & his gang, so they never thought of someone doing this.

May I suggest you go for a dual installation, have w98 for your sims and the stable w2k for the rest?

You can even do this on two drives, and drives are not so expensive anymore...

Migration from one drive to another is possible with norton ghost, very fast and reliable, once you read and understand the manual (360 pages....)
Also Powerquest with the Drive Image 5.0 can do the job....

I do have two H/D both IBM deskstars ones got 98 installed the other 2k.
I have bios set to auto,just a simple matter to swop disks and reboot.
The only reason I have 2k installed was to run both cpu,s,
I am going to put new motherboard and cpu in the machine.
Problem I had was, I could not configure the 98 disc to be slave of the 2k disk or visa vera, tried all ways the machine refused to boot.
cant transfer files from one disk to the other, so I would rather have both disc's running 98.
I simply want to delete win 2k from the disc and replace it with 98.
without losing the rest of the stuff on the disc.
In 98 there is the option to remove windows in the add remove utility.
There doesn't appear to be that option in win2k.
Dont think the win98 settup will allow you to install a older operatin system than the one installed.

look here.... Microsoft Knowledge Centre (http://www.microsoft.com/windows2000/support/issues/uninstall-issues.asp)
this telles you exactly what you want to read...looks like you are not the first one with this idea.

Tony,

Just to clarify...

You have two hard drives and both are formatted as FAT32 partitions? NTFS hasn't been used for the Win 2000 partition?

One can be used to boot with Win 98 and the other can be used to boot with Win 2000?

Now the obvious thing to do (if you have access to no other mass storage devices) is to dump the files from the 2000 disc to the 98 disc and reformat.

However, you say that you cannot transfer files between them because cannot access both discs simultaneously? And you say the reason is that you can't configure one or the other to be a slave?

If this is all true then - solve the concurrent access problem and getting rid of 2000 should be a trivial issue.

So in order to access both discs...

When you say the machine refuses to boot with both connected - could you get into the BIOS and see which of the HD drives could be detected? Do you have diagrams for the appropriate jumper settings (M, S, CSL)? If not I might be able to point you in the right direction if you know the drive model numbers (i.e. what type of Deskstar?)

But why does one need to be a slave at all? Do they have to share a cable? Can't they each have their own IDE channel? All motherboards have two IDE channels don't they? Can't you connect the 98 HD to IDE 1 configured as master and the 2000 disc to IDE 2 also as master?

Maybe you've got a CD drive attached to IDE 2? Or if you haven't got anything in the second IDE socket you'll probably need to get another cable.

Yes both disks are using fat32, as mentioned above I have tried configuring the 98 disk as slave to the 2k disk and visa versa, the machine refuses to boot, I get primary hard disk falier insert boot disc blah blah blah message.
I have not tried making the 98 disk secondary master , I will give that a try today
I have extra long ribbon cabled on the ide sockets because the cd and h/d sit on top of my desk not in the machine, I could shut down change discs and reboot in a matter of moments, so I have never bothered with dual boot system.

Tony,

If the separate IDE channel option doesn't work for you then you could try installing Win 98 over the top of Win 2000 using the methods on the Microsoft Knowledge Base page (http://www.microsoft.com/windows2000/support/issues/uninstall-issues.asp) that FL310 suggested. There it suggested that you simply rename the folders you want to preserve and run the Win 98 installation.

However, success will depend on exactly which version of Win 98 you have on disc.

1) If you have an OEM version - this won't work since it requires a blank partition that does not already contain an operating system.

2) If you have an Upgrade version - this searches for a pre-existing version of Windows so it will all depend on whether Win 98 upgrade is willing to recognise Win 2000 as a previous version.

3) If you have a full retail version of Win 98 - this may not care that there is a previous OS on the partition and certainly shouldn't require one to be there. So you should just be able to rename the folders of the stuff you want to keep and install.

I think that only the upgrade version would allow you to preserve your program installations - so you may just be able to preserve your data and will need to reinstall the software.